This one’s been bugging me for quite a while: Why do so many people feel the need to try to quantify being trans? Why is there a desire to have a linear scale, with cisgender male (not trans at all) at one end of it, and at the other (completely trans) post-op transsexual who’s known that they were being raised as the wrong gender since they were three years old?

This is where the COGIATI test (debunked elsewhere in this blog) gets it horribly wrong. The reason it’s bunk is that it sets out to quantify the unquantifiable. Scoring or losing points depending on whether or not you can park a car properly or remember what somebody smelled like. It clutches at straws because there are only straws to clutch at.

The problems with trying to quantify trans, especially on a single, linear scale, are manifold:

1) It invites people to try to be more trans rather than who they are. I’ve watched people do this with the COGIATI. “Yay, I scored 15 more points than I did last time round. I’m making progress.”

2) It plays into trans elitism, and indeed typically has trans elitism at its root. Post-op is better than pre-op is better than non-op is better than TV is better than CD is better than HPW.

3) Once you start keeping scores, it allows you to grade those scores. To decide who passes the threshold for ‘truly trans’ and who’s just a man mucking around in a dress. It becomes a tool for dividing the ‘real’ trans from the ‘fake’ trans, in the way that the TERFs try to distinguish between ‘real’ and (to them) ‘fake’ women. It’s all about validating their own identity, at the expense of somebody else’s.

4) It’s a lot more complex than the linear scale. Some have known since childhood, while others figured it out later in life. Some experience gender dysphoria, others don’t. Some have an element of autogynephilia, while others do not. These aspects don’t necessarily align the way you’d expect them to. Some people might tick all of the boxes. Some might tick only some, even though they feel very strongly about the ones that they do.

Being trans is a matter of identity, therefore if you sincerely identify as trans then you are trans. Nobody’s 60% a photographer or 35% a gardener. They either are these things or they’re not, largely on the basis of whether or not they say so. I honestly can’t think of any other instance where people try to score identity (with any degree of seriousness) the same way they do with being trans.